How to Convert Web Sites to PDF Documents

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If you're a site designer, an instructor, an archiver or historian, you already know that working with Web pages can be difficult for two reasons. First, they change. Second, you can't always guarantee a solid Internet connection during a live presentation. With this in mind, Adobe has added a full-featured capture utility to its new Acrobat Pro 9. This Web conversion tool expands upon the capabilities of the feature that installed, in previous Acrobat versions, as a toolbar in your browser. Now, instead of capturing only one Web page (the page currently displayed in the browser) as a PDF, you can convert all the pages on a site to the link-depth of your choice.

First, the way to capture just a few pages of a site remains the Conversion button that Acrobat places on your browser when you install the Pro version of Adobe's program. Navigate to the URL you want to capture, and click Convert. In the resulting Save As dialog, give your new PDF a name and click Save. Now navigate to the next page in the site you want to capture. This time, click the down arrow beside the Convert button to reveal the menu and choose Add Web Page to Existing PDF. Browse to the PDF you've already saved (or accept the default if it's the same one you just created) and click Save. Open the PDF in Acrobat and you'll see the two pages as one file. If you want to specify other conversion options, from the same menu choose Preferences and beside the File Type field click Settings. In the Other Settings region of the HTML Conversion Settings dialog, you can opt to capture with or without the page background, images, multimedia content, and underlined links.

To convert more than a few pages of a site, open Acrobat Pro 9 itself. From the File menu, choose Create PDF. The resulting submenu actually offers a host of useful choices worth noting for future use, but for now select From Web Page.

By default, Acrobat captures only the top level (typically the home page) of the site. Use the arrows to change the number of levels you want to capture, but be aware that more than two levels of a major site will result in a very lengthy download and conversion process. The figure below shows a portion of the PDF document created by selecting two levels from the Microsoft site; note the vertical scroll bar beside the thumbnails. It's not hard to speculate how large the PDF would become if three levels were selected.

There are other choices to help you keep the size of the download and the length of the conversion reasonable. Click the Settings button to reveal the Web Page Conversion Settings dialog discussed above, and choose whether to capture images and multimedia files. You can check one or both: Stay on same path, forcing Acrobat to follow only URLs that are subordinate to the URL you typed; and Stay on same server, forcing the program to download only pages stored on the same server as the typed URL. Either choice yields a smaller final PDF, but you'll likely miss some important pages this way.

Click Create to start the download and conversion. Acrobat displays the Download Status window to show you the process and then, when finished, displays the converted PDF. If the Web site contains multimedia files that Acrobat can play, it asks if you wish to do so, and unless you have a reason to block them, you should say yes. Without them you won't be getting the whole site.